Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

What with all the chatter lately about Sears and Kmart I thought I would *finally* get up these shots of the former Kmart at Inlet Square in Murrells Inlet. Part of the delay was I thought I had some other shots with the closing signage up somewhere, but if I did, I can't find them.

Anyway, this store opened, in the 80s as I recall, with great fanfare as it was the first Kmart anywhere to be attached to a mall, all the others up until that point being freestanding. That meant it was a bit of a square peg in a round hole in some ways: for instance, you could not take your shopping carts from Kmart into the rest of the mall (other than directly to and from the entrances).

The experiment apparently worked (for a while) as a similar attached store later opened at Briarcliff Mall (now Myrtle Beach Mall) though it too is now gone.

Here is a contemporary WBTW story on the store closing. It's particularly interesting as it gives the viewpoint of another merchant in the mall, who is saying essentially "Well, it's hurting me, but at least we still have Penny's, Belk and the theaters", the first and last of which have both now also closed..

I believe there is now a Planet Fitness in this space, I will try to get some shots next time I drive by (hopefully in the daytime).

UPDATE 7 October 2019: Add map icon, update tags & add full street address.

Where's Waldo?

As it turns out, the answer to this perennial question is "On US-301 just south of Starke". In fact, when I found this closed Cafe Risque this summer, I believed I was in Starke, and not this particular Alachua County metropolis of 1015 souls.

In the event, I had driven by the vacant building on the east side of the road, when the partial sign I had seen percolated to the front of my brain, and I turned around to get some pictures.

I had written about Cafe Risque before, when I noticed I was no longer seeing the I-95 billboards around Darien Georgia. Doing a little more googling this time, I see that the Cafe Risque story is a bit stranger than I might have thought: the whole chain grew out of a family restaurant empire called "Skeeter's Breakfast House". Apparently that legacy led to Cafe Risque's key insight: You could run strip clubs without alcohol if you put them in out of the way places and had decent food. Certainly, the regulatory hurdles are lower that way. Of course, it's questionable if that model still works as most of the places have closed in recent years (apparently one both opened and closed in Dunn after I left the Fayetteville area) though some of that may be due to the death of the man who was the chain's driving force as referenced at the first link above. As of this posting, it appears that the location on I-75 in Micanopy Florida is the only one left as described in this (somewhat NSFW) article in Gainesville Scene.

Well, this has already been discussed extensively on Have Your Say, but Eric's San Jose on Garners Ferry closed on Thursday 22 December 2016.

I believe I may have eaten in the building a few times when it was a steakhouse, but can only recall eating at Eric's once, when I found it of a piece with the Columbia Mexican restaurant scene: perfectly acceptable, but nothing special.

According to The Free Times:

Owner Eric Leon has sold the property to some developers who plan to build a cellular store and other retail shops...

UPDATE 8 February 2017 -- As mentioned in the comments, this building has been razed:

UPDATE 6 June 2017 -- The new building is going up (pic from 19 May 2017):

UPDATE 13 September 2017 -- The new building is almost done:

UPDATE 25 October 2017 -- Now open as a Verizon location (relocated from here):

UPDATE 21 May 2018 -- The new Eric's San Jose location at 4478 Rosewood Drive (the old Rooftop Pizza Pub location) is now open:

Well, Don Pablo's continues to dwindle away to nothing. As I wrote here, I used to like to go to the Columbia Mall location. Then when that closed, I was working in Augusta and used to like to go to that location. Then that closed, and I would hit the Charleston location from time to time, then that closed and I would stop by the Charlotte location once or twice a year, then that closed, and I would try to go to the Arlington location when I was in DC on business (hard if I had no car..), then that job evaporated and I would stop by the Atlanta location once a year or so, then that closed and I would hit the Greenville location when I had a leisurely weekend, then that closed, but I figured I could still hit the Orlando location on one of my periodic runs through Florida..

Well, no more. Orlando closed in October after the chain filed for Chapter 11 on 4 October 2016, as I found well after the fact.

It wasn't a total loss, driving down International, I had seen another Mexican place, Chuy's, so I backed up to there and had an excellent chile relleno, probably the best one I've had since I was in San Antonio.

Oh, and I don't think I know of a good way to be fired

but this *definitely* is not it.

I noticed that this tire center on Broad River Road was vacant last time I drove by. For now you can see a good picture of it in operation as Buy & Save in Google Street View here.

The sign proclaims that it will soon be another tire operation: Tires & Beyond. Beyond *what* I'm not sure.

I just noticed that this print shop on Two Notch by the old Mayo's Suit City was vacant. They list in this year's phonebook, so I'm going to 2016 on the date.

The name caught my eye because when I first started work, we had a bunch of Imagen printers on our network and would deploy them to various clients. The engines were 300dpi Canon behemoths that would keep working through flood, fire or the zombie apocalypse. It was the same engine, in fact, that Apple used shortly thereafter for the first LaserWriter. The engine however, sat on top of a cpu box with a 5.25 floppy that booted the printer operating system and provided Imagen's page description language: Impress. After the LaserWriter came out, suddenly Diablo 630 daisy-wheel emulation wasn't enough, and we spent a lot of time and effort trying to make those sunk-cost Impress printers work like Apple PostScript..

As you can see, it was raining pretty hard, so I did not get very good pictures, but I noticed the For Sale sign on this office building a few weeks ago when I was in the Owens Field area. That's right, Columbia has *two* roads named "Airport Boulevard", something I did not know.

From what I can gather National Distributing Co is a wine wholesaler, which left this building around 2010 for a site off of Bluff Road. They no longer seem to be listed in the phonebook, so I believe they left the Columbia market after that, though they are still in business nationally.

Note the City Roots greenhouse (or whatever you call it, since it is not enclosed) to the right -- I didn't realize this was where they are located.

Since S & S moved out of this Richland Mall slot, nothing has stuck, with both Sadie's and now Jackson's moving on.

In this case we have a move instead of a closing, and JackSon's should now be open at 1213 Sunset Boulevard, which is, of course, the former location of Ms. B's Southern Kitchen and The Southern Skillet.

Man, this wing of the Mall is creepy empty now!

And

I think they want you to go left.

(Hat tip to commenter Mr. BO)

UPDATE 23 January 2017 -- I got by the new location on Sunset last weekend. Apparently they are still not quite open:

This year the annual Brookgreen Gardens Nights of 1000 Candles festival is set up a little differently in that you need to buy your tickets online in advance. This was done to prevent overcrowding and expedite the often rather tedious entrance process. It worked well, but I think they may have perhaps shot themselves a bit in the foot income-wise because it did seem to to reduce the crowd a good bit from previous years. At any rate, I chose 2 December this year, and the night was quite comfortable, not as cold as some years where I could barely feel the camera buttons through the frostbite, nor as warm as one or two years when I didn't need a jacket at all.

There's always a bit that's different or new every year, but this year the changes were fairly modest: I think the only one that really comes to mind is a new field of staked candles on the green space in front of Pegasus. The vintage christmas display did have some new roller coasters on the Lionel display, and they really zipped along!

The festival is running weekends through 18 December, so if you have some spare time, and are in, or can get to, the area, I highly recommend it.

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